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Tuesday, April 23, 2013

My friend R. has endured a long and difficult winter. It was a tunnel of a season, and happy news made spring a burst of light, both figuratively and literally, at the end of it for her, her family, and friends.
And Nature, after having been so cruel, now saw fit to present a tiny gift: An Anna's hummingbird came and made her nest in a shrub in her garden, weaving it on a limb at head height and within arm's reach.Fortunately for this trusting little bird, she selected a garden in which nobody would disturb her, though she doesn't appear bothered by people peeping at her or photographing her at long range. She goes about her age-old springtime duties without any knowledge of the meaning with which we, the watchers, invest it.
The first nest she built, for example, was destroyed by a violently windy rainstorm. So, too, were the miniature pair of eggs she'd laid in it. Undaunted, she immediately set to work again, carefully constructing a new cup of wispy leaves, tiny feathers, and plant down, bound with spider webs and stippled with specks of lichen and moss. She weighs no more than a nickel, yet has the heart of a lion, persevering against all odds.

We're certainly not the first to notice how fearless and determined a hummingbird is. Various Native American peoples credited hummingbirds with the power to stop volcanic eruptions, cause rain, create stars by stitching the night sky with their beaks, and fly above the sky to see past the blue.
The Aztecs esteemed a hummingbird god of war and sun and believed that the souls of fallen warriors became hummingbirds. Many cultures believed hummingbirds carried messages between the human world and The Beyond.To the Maya, the hummingbird was the sun in bird form. An old Mojave story tells how a hummingbird brought sunlight from the underworld and gave it to humans. Its role as a pollinator of flowers was appreciated, too, and inspired the Taino of the Caribbean to consider the hummingbird as a symbol of new life.

"Enough with the symbolism," the bird nesting in R.'s garden interrupts. "I have two 'symbols' of my own to tend!"
Soon after building her new nest, she'd laid two eggs--a typical clutch size for a hummingbird. Each egg was about the size of a jellybean.
About two weeks later, the eggs hatched. The impossibly small chicks together weighed little more than a paperclip.

But what an appetite they proved to have! Now the female hummingbird spends the day feeding herself so that she can feed them. She carries a porridge of tiny insects and spiders mixed with nectar in her crop and regurgitates it into the gaping maws of the chicks.
Anybody who has watched a hummingbird feed her babies is astonished that the babies survive it; they could all go on to careers as miniature sword-swallowers.

A typical day for a hummingbird requires lots of energy-intensive flying, including hovering beside flowers. A hummingbird's small size adds to its caloric demand: its surface area is proportionately larger for its size than a bigger bird’s, so it loses body heat more readily.
So it's not surprising that a hummingbird has a high metabolic rate requiring lots of fuel. A hummingbird eats about half its weight in food each day and spends about 15 percent of its time feeding and another 80 percent perched, digesting.It's hard to imagine how the mother bird manages to meet her own caloric needs, let alone that of two ravenous babies who also need to be kept warm. Or how she manages to survive and thrive despite the hailstorm that pelted us last week.What about Papa Hummingbird? Where's he during all this drama?
Well. Papa has nothing to do with the babies. He's too busy staking out territory and showing off his beautiful crown and gorget of iridescent red feathers to do any grocery shopping or spoon feeding. I photographed the one below showing off in Carkeek Park.

In barely three weeks, the chicks will be ready to leave the nest. Then each one will strike out on its own, having nothing more to do with its mom or its sibling.
In the words of John James Audubon himself, it will fly "on humming winglets through the air, suspended as if by magic in it, flitting from one flower to another, with motions as graceful as they are light and airy, pursuing its course over our extensive continent, and yielding new delights wherever it is seen."

Thursday, April 11, 2013

OK, so a bunch of unicorns is actually known as a "blessing" (one of the many collective terms for animals that have their origins in poetic works dating back to the 1400s and are not, as is popularly believed on the Internet, established technical terms--which in no way diminishes how clever or pretty they are).

Certainly being infested with unicorns would be a blessing, compared to the rabble of rats we recently paid to have eliminated, and the irritation of fleas we suppressed. (I realize that we may now have guaranteed that nobody will be visiting us anytime soon.)

Hmm. An infestation of unicorns would probably mean lots of sparkles and rainbows. I could deal with that.

Anyway, I did happen to notice an uptick in unicorn sightings this past week.

I encountered this at one of my favorite coffee shops, Java Bean in Ballard:

A day or two later, this sign appeared in another coffee shop, this time in Duvall:

Then an ordinary trip to the grocery store--about the most mundane errand imaginable--yielded yet another unicorn sighting (and this one even *lights* *up*):

Shortly after, I was browsing in a bookstore and took a photograph of a book I wanted to remember to check out later on at the library...and when I looked at the photo online, tucked way up in the corner (cropped and enlarged here for your benefit) was yet another unicorn, on a different book.

It's not like we have a shortage of unicorns at home. There is this one in the bedroom, created by the Resident Teenager back when she was the Resident Kindergartner:

And its twin, in the bathroom:

And this goofy little guy, leaning against a Belleek butter dish...

who lives right next door to a unicorn crafted out of an old flocked toy pony by an artist friend.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

"It had been raining for seven months; dozens of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Seattle, and this was the life of the men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives."

With deepest apologies to Ray Bradbury. But really, after a Seattle winter, one feels an awful lot like Margot locked in the closet.

So it was with hopeful and astonished delight that we soggy, mossy denizens of the Pacific Northwest saw the sun rise and yea, verily, shine upon us starting on Friday and continuing pretty much nonstop through Easter Sunday.

This makes us stop and take pictures of blue sky and the sun shining on things because we just can't believe it's true. Plus it might not happen again any time soon. (Indeed, the gray is back today.)

Piccalilli Pie's a little of this, a little of that...

but mostly about animals, children's books, writing, cooking, baking, coffee and the need for, needle felting, random stuff I like, and words that would catch a magpie's eye if magpies could read. Which maybe they can and they're just keeping it a big secret.